The Guardian: "Why We Build, by Rowan Moore – a vivid but too even-handed study of architecture"

Link to The Guardian

"Imagine a speculative development, on the edges of London. The designers were anonymous; the style was out of fashion; the materials were cheap; the build quality low. 

"Soon after it was built, and left partly unfinished, local people started calling the half-occupied units 'Brent Cross'*. 'The whole estate,' wrote one contemporary, 'was a graveyard of buried hopes.' 

"Later, this depopulated failure became a byword for overcrowding, with a notoriously exploitative slum landlord. It was known for rioting and drug dealing. Imagine, finally, that this place had been praised by an architectural writer as 'a wonder of the world, a feat of construction the equal of the Pyramids'."

[* we made that bit up.]

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Review:

"Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, by Taras Grescoe"

Link to The Guardian review

"Margaret Thatcher once declared that:

"a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure". 

Taras Grescoe is proud to be – in Thatcher's estimation, at least – a failure. Although he can drive, the Canadian author, who is in his mid-40s, has never owned a car. And he is not alone. Half the population of cities such as New York, Toronto and London do not own cars. Every day some 155 million people take the underground. 

"And although being a straphanger in North America may be, as Grescoe shows, a 'depressing experience' due to underfunding and bad planning, elsewhere public transport – particularly in cities – is enjoying a renaissance.

"The heyday of the car has passed."